The Twenty-First Night of Halloween: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

ON THE TWENTY-FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), an Iranian vampire film by Ana Lily Amirpour. A town on the edge of nowhere called Bad City harbors a handful of lonely outcasts, including a small boy whose parents are nowhere to be seen, a young man in a leather jacket and pompadour who longs to fly this coop, his miserable heroin-addicted father, their hapless cat, a middle-aged streetwalking sex worker, and the tyrannical pimp and drug dealer who terrorizes all of them. When a mysterious woman in a long black head scarf that looks like a death shroud appears, we are happy to see her bare her vampiric fangs and devour the drug dealer, thereby freeing the town from his evil. Bad City is not off the hook so easily, though, for this vampire has come to stay.

So, initially the film is a moody and poetic small town character drama disrupted by a vampire striking like a hungry panther. It’s shot in high contrast black and white, with lots of inky pools that connote blood and death. What soon comes to dominate the story, however, is the lyricism of doomed romance, when the vampire and the rockabilly-styling young man begin flirtatiously circling one another. She bumps into him on the street after he stumbles out of a party; she is tempted to bite him but resists; they dance to a gothy new wave song in her apartment; and later, in an inversion, he pierces her ears so she can wear the earrings he gives her (which he stole from a rich woman he does yard work for). Amirpour makes the usual parallels between drug use, sex, and vampirism, but she handles these cross-reflecting symbols with remarkable tenderness and originality. 

It’s interesting how much nostalgic Western iconography there is, from the music to the fashions to the 1957 Thunderbird convertible that the first act revolves around. The cinematography and editing are also clearly intended to pay homage to 1950’s drive-in horror flicks like I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and Blood of Dracula (1957). In fact, the vampire stands out because she is the only one who wears traditional Muslim garb, and even then, she strips this away in her more human moments, so as to look more like an American youth. I suppose there could be a meditation here on Persian history haunting Westernized Iranian communities, but I don’t have enough cultural context to say more.

In any case, the gothic romanticism of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is quite powerful, on par with the doomed vampiric post-punk love of Near Dark (maybe my favorite vampire movie).